[orac]

Everyone, please excuse my long absence. The outside world took priority these past two weeks. Things seem to be settling back down a bit.

So, in reference to all my original questions and problems relating to getting my dish/motor to work in harmony, the final root cause of my problems turned out to be an ever so slightly mispointed dish, no more than 1/32 of an inch on the 2-3/8 inch diameter pole. I was getting my "south" satellite fine but when I used USALS to point to the "end" satellites I wasn't getting them. After repointing the dish that small amount, all the satellites came in perfectly along the entire usable arc with USALS. So, I've abandoned any attempt to use DisEqC 1.2 positioning, which, by the way, I still couldn't figure out how to use properly with this receiver.

I did go ahead and download the latest firmware from FortecStar (wish their site would allow use of Netscape) and was happy that all my TP mods were not overwritten. Most visible improvement in operation with the new firmware is the properly operating signal quality meter. Now it behaves like a proper "Bell" curve with the peak in the middle whereas before it was more like an inverted Bell curve where the strongest signal indication was right at the edges just before you lost the signal.

Clock is still losing a minute a day, and I've since realized, too, that very little detail is given in the manual about how to operate the on/off timers. Worst of all when setting the channel to be tuned when the timer comes on, you can't directly enter a channel number, you have to scroll through the list of ALL channels you have saved, one at a time, until you get to the one you want. That could prove to be a major annoyance if one has all 3000 available channel memories in use. (up to 1500 button pushes just to set a stinking timer!)

I hooked up my Toshiba TRX 1820 analog tuner last weekend to try to get some analog feeds, without success. Absolutely nothing. Not sure I have things set up properly, though, so here's another round of questions.

(1) The Lifetime's loop-through output is connected to the Toshiba's Ku input. I've used the Lifetime to point to the satellite I want, and tuned to a stored digital channel with the same polarity as the analog channel I want to view on the Toshiba. Is this the best way to do it?

(2) In the above scenario, am I right in assuming the Lifetime must be on while I watch the analog feed on the Toshiba, and that the correct polarity must be set by the Lifetime?

(3) Is there an "always on" analog feed on Ku somewhere that I can go to check my setup and equipment operation? I see the SES Americom test card listed on AMC 9, but the problem there is I don't have any channels with V polarity on that satellite stored in the Lifetime, so I can't set the LNB accordingly to allow the Toshiba to see the analog feed. Don't see any other permanent analog feeds on Ku anywhere.

(4) Is the Toshiba expecting to see a different Ku LNB than the one I have? I have a universal, 9750/10600. The Toshiba documentation doesn't say, but I'm guessing it's looking for a 10750 (11,700 - 950). How would I adjust the freq I'm trying to tune on the Toshiba to account for this discrepancy? Does this question make any sense?

I'll reserve my final question until I see how far off base I am about my understanding of things.
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Neil